RIT professor elected vice president of Association of Computing Machinery

Vicki Hanson looks to help lead ACM amid changes in computing community

Rochester Institute of Technology Distinguished Professor Vicki Hanson was elected vice president of the Association of Computing Machinery, the world’s largest educational and scientific computing society.

She will help represent more than 100,000 ACM members worldwide when she begins her two-year term July 1.

Hanson has been a member and active ACM volunteer for more than two decades, contributing to many association conferences and serving on the ACM executive committee, first as the Special Interest Group governing board chair and more recently as ACM secretary/treasurer. As vice president, she hopes to use her expertise to better position ACM to meet the challenges posed by a rapidly evolving computing environment.

“I look forward to helping shape decisions that affect the field, while providing an environment that fosters technical innovation and supports new computing professionals,” said Hanson. “ACM has never had as much impact as it does now.”

Hanson notes that ACM volunteers and professional staff serve a growing international community of researchers, practitioners and students through a wide variety of conferences, publications, webinars and educational resources.

“It’s exciting to have someone of Vicki’s stature within this worldwide community as part of the faculty here at RIT,” said Andrew Sears, dean of RIT’s B. Thomas Golisano College of Computing and Information Sciences. “It really speaks to the quality of our computing programs and RIT as an institution.”

Hanson, who joined RIT in 2013, has experience in both industry and academia. She worked as a research staff member with IBM Research, where she received an IBM Corporate Award for pioneering technology and innovation supporting IBM’s contributions to accessibility. Business Insider also named her one of the 25 Most Powerful Women Engineers in Tech.

Since then, she has worked as a professor at the University of Dundee in Scotland, leading teams investigating issues of inclusion for older adults and people with disabilities. As professional recognition for her contributions, she was named an ACM Fellow in 2004, a Chartered Fellow of the British Computer Society in 2008 and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2013. She is also serving as one of the founding members of the ACM-W Europe Executive Committee, an organization that supports women in computing professions.